Review: French Encounters with the American Counterculture, 1960–1980 by Caroline Maniaque-Benton

Abstract

Caroline Maniaque-Benton French Encounters with the American Counterculture, 1960–1980 Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011, 244 pp., 51 color and 58 b/w illus. $99.95, ISBN 9781409423867 This handsome book investigates an intriguing and novel topic: the French attraction to American “alternative architecture,” which was prompted by the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and which is being revisited by historians as a harbinger of today’s sustainability movement. The book’s protagonists were young Frenchmen, mostly recent graduates of the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts and architecture students, who discovered America’s alternative architecture through publications and road trips in the western United States, including visits to iconic settlements such as Drop City (pictured on the cover of the book). These young travelers became prominent educators (Pierre Joly and Marc Vaye), practitioners (Francois Lombard and Jean-Louis Veret), writers (Patrice Goulet), and publishers (Jean-Paul Jungman and the founders of the Editions Parentheses). Maniaque-Benton interviewed them around 2000 and pored over their personal archives and book collections. Extensive quotes from these interviews, as well as reproductions of travel photographs and book covers, bring substance and vivacity to her account. Readers will notice that the book’s cast of characters includes no women, with the exception of a cameo appearance by Agnes Varda. In 1967, the movie director shot a twenty-two-minute film, Uncle Yanco , in the Sausalito houseboat community, “a place of pilgrimage for European architects who were attracted to these strange and wonderful constructions” (27). One is left to wonder whether male bonding, as experienced by several protagonists in tandem or as a trio of travelers, was integral to this rite of passage through a distant and exotic culture. Chapter 1, “Framing the Debates around Technology,” accounts for the rich and complex historical context behind this initiation into American counterculture, which took place at a time when France’s “aversion to American imperialism” (3) was extreme and when architectural training in Paris became pluralistic, as the previously centralized Ecole des Beaux-Arts atelier system …